Henry V at the RSC – Shakespeare’s war play fails to resonate

A head of state looks to history to find justification for (re)claiming foreign territory. An ultimatum rejected, he unleashes war on the now-enemy; besieges one of its  cities; threatens the inhabitants with violent annihilation, following a code of battle derived from religious text; on the eve of the decisive battle, his men exhausted and outnumbered, he looks to God to help him win victory. On the page, Shakespeare’s Henry V, with its dramatic examination of the pity, horror and glory of war, reads very much like a play for today.

An indefinite somewhere, not here, not now, is suggested by designer Lucy Osborne’s bare stage, backed by a three-storey scaffolding revolve, and peopled by characters in non-period-specific costumes. Director Tamara Harvey’s production focuses on a timeless aspect of conflict: the powerlessness of ordinary people when leaders become bellicose. Shakespeare develops this theme dramatically, in part through ironic juxtaposition of scenes and encounters between individuals (notably, Henry and a soldier, William, the night before the decisive battle). Harvey pushes the point visually by introducing extra players, who act as silent, ironic commentary on the action (Shakespeare’s own commentator, named Chorus, is cut, their lines distributed among the actors).

Where Harvey’s directorial approach works best is in the scenes of combat. Here, numbers deliver energy and dynamism. Elsewhere, additions feel unnecessary, even distasteful: a crowd watching the hanging of the traitors above Henry’s head while he delivers the chorus’s lines describing the departure for France; the setting of the comic language-lesson scene between French princess Katherine and her gentlewoman, Alice, in a field hospital, with the women using the wounded to develop Katherine’s vocabulary of body parts.

Alfred Enoch’s Henry is engaging and, with the other 18 actors and 15 supernumeraries, clearly committed to achieving the director’s aims. Overall, though, characters and text feel subsidiary to the visual and sound effects (Jamie Salisbury’s score, pleasant but over-intrusive). The immediacy of Shakespeare’s dramatic probing of the morality of war is muffled.

Henry V is at Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 25 April

Photograph by Johan Persson